Landlord · Sioux Falls, SD · Member since 2016 · 100 posts · 58 votes
I have the following tenant situation applying for my current open property: Husband with stable job who exceeds 3x income, wife who stays home with kids (no income) and mother of wife who is also employed. Husband will be paying rent. I am running background checks on all adults. My question is: since husband qualifies on his own for rent, would you recommend I run just the husband's credit report? Or credit reports on all adults as well? Seems a bit like overkill but I don't want to miss something.
We run credit checks on ALL adults who will be residing in the rental unit.
What would you do (for example) if the husbands credit comes back fine (as it is likely to do) but the wife has a long, long history of items in collection?
Like @Gail K., I run credit checks on all adult applicants. It's fine that one half of a couple qualifies based on their income, but I also have a policy of not renting to anyone with a prior eviction. So even if the husband's income qualified by himself, I still wouldn't rent to them if the wife had a prior eviction.
Run it on all adults. There is no real potential upside to not doing this. Only thing i could possibly think of is u make them upset by costing them more for the background check fee and u lose a potential tenant, but in reality that is a benefit cuz u wouldnt want them as tenants anyways.
I am not a landlord but I think running it on everyone would be the best. You definitely want the full picture of who will be living there. Also, what is the worst that happens? You paid a few bucks for a credit check. If you DON'T do the check though, and something happened, you'd be kicking yourself pretty hard!
I would be consistent in what you do and run a credit check on everyone. If the husband is making the money in this case, he will likely to have to pay for any of his wife's credit issues (if they exist), so you want to know about them.